Medieval Afterlives in Popular Culture

by Ashton, Gail; Kline, Daniel T.

• ISBN13: 9780230337343
• ISBN10: 0230337341
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-12-11
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Drawing from an eclectic mix of scholars from the US, UK, and Australia, Medieval Afterlives in Popular Culture examines the persistence of medieval themes, characters, and situations in a variety of media from reality television to Virginia Woolf, from Arthurian film to Disney animation, from Shrek to historical fantasy. Each essay demonstrates that the Middle Ages are not relegated to a static past but continue to fashion a vital presence in contemporary popular culture, changing our assumptions about the flow of history and the creation of the present.

Author Biography

Gail Ashton is an independent scholar and poet. She previously taught at the University of Manchester and the University of Birmingham and writes, edits, and reviews medieval and contemporary literature, especially Chaucer and poetry.

Daniel T. Kline is a professor and Chair of English at the University of Alaska Anchorage. He specializes in Middle English literature and culture, literary and cultural theory, and digital medievalism. He has published in Chaucer Review, College Literature, Comparative Drama, the Journal of English and Germanic Philology, and Philological Quarterly, among others.

Table of Contents

'The YouTube Prioress: Anti-Semitism and Twenty-First Century Participatory Culture' 'Animated Conversations in Nottingham: Disney's Robin Hood (1973) ' 'Virginia Woolf's Middle Ages' 'Dario Fo's Mistero Buffo and the Left-Modernist Reclamation of Medieval Popular Culture''Acephalic History: A Bataillian Reading of Monty Python and the Holy Grail''Medievalism and Periodization in Frozen River and The Second Shepherds' Play: Environment, Class, Miracle''Time Travel, Pulp Fictions, and Changing Attitudes Toward the Middle Ages: Why You Can't Get Renaissance on Somebody's Ass''H. P. Lovecraft's Unnamable Middle Ages''Confession, Contrition, and the Rhetoric of Tears: Medievalism and Reality Television,' 'Robin Hood, Frenched''Brief Encounters: Arthur's Epic Journey in Antoine Fuqua's King Arthur (2005)'''My other world': Historical Reflections and Refractions in Modern Arthurian Fantasy''Queer Origins, Deformed Lines: Seeding the Future in Torchwood's 'Children of Earth'''The Medieval Entertainment Channel: The Shrek Quartet'